Are we red or are we blue

It’s always fun to facilitate an Agile Basics Training. This time 25 participants waited for my colleague and me.

The company builds storage facilities and automates them for their customers. Lately they experienced that new customers demanded in the contracting phase that the process should be agile. Now they wandered if that was really necessary – their waterfall process delivered satisfactory results in their opinion. Furthermore they questioned, if they knew enough about agile to have a qualified conversation about this specific need of their customers.

The participants went along with our training until the point where we introduced Scrum to them. It was like an uproar. It was a fantastic moment, because it revealed what the situation was really about. One participant nailed it later by saying: we try to get our heads around a “red” way of working, while deep in our corporate culture we are “blue”. He said it without judgement and was referring to the blue and red ways of work described in the book “Komplexithoden” by Niels Pfläging and Silke Hermann that we worked with earlier in the training.

At the end of the day they had a lot of new insights and were ready for the next step.